The Still World
by esplanade
Summary: "The first time Sherlock Holmes stopped the world, he was seventeen...And while some days he relished in the solitude, others the emptiness of the world was so staggering that he despised it...He began to resent the ability, wishing instead only for a mind that was not in a constant state of attempted self-destruction. Then one day, the world stopped at someone else's hands."


Notes: Hey I think I'll write magical realism despite not knowing how to write magical realism. And I think I'll write with hardly any dialogue despite _knowing how to write dialogue_.  
There's no way that could be problematic.

* * *

The first time Sherlock Holmes stopped the world, he was seventeen. He would never forget the shock he felt upon seeing his parents and his brother frozen in place in the parlor of their estate. Of course, he believed it to be a fluke, not something _he_ had done, until it happened time after time, always at his bidding. And while many young men would have panicked, Sherlock instead instantly recognized the potential of such an ability. He seized every opportunity. At first he took joy in some simple pleasures, mostly involving causing minor and humorous injuries to Mycroft. Occasionally he would only read for hours on end. Then he realized he could do whatever he wanted. There were no rules anymore.

This was all fine and good until he was older, and looking for something to fill the empty hours he was left with when he stopped time. He could never bring anyone with him. He was always trapped, the only motion in a still world. And while some days he relished in the solitude, others the emptiness of the world was so staggering that he despised it. Of course, he alone controlled when he invoked this silence, but often he only did so because it was preferable to the moving world.

On days like that, he turned to other things to make the stillness more bearable than the whirling motions real life. Drugs were easy enough to obtain when one could pluck them right from the dealer's pocket. But part of him knew he wouldn't last long if he continued like that.

He had the entire universe at his fingertips. And nothing to do with it. His mind refused to let him stop, barely contained by the cases he began to work for Greg Lestrade as an alternative to drugs. Stopping the world was only good for extra time to solve murders, time to perform experiments. When these things were not present, it was unbearable. He began to resent the ability, wishing instead only for a mind that was not in a constant state of attempted self-destruction.

Then one day, the world stopped at someone else's hands.

... ... ...

Sherlock was in his cramped flat when he felt the strange tug that always accompanied the world stopping. Except this time, he hadn't willed it to. He looked around his living room, frowning in a rare case of confusion. When he left the flat, he found London frozen as always, but he was intensely disturbed instead of pleased to see the stopped cars and poised pedestrians.

He considered the possibilities.

One: This was a fluke of his own ability, like a short in a wired system.

Two: His own ability was becoming dysfunctional, signaling an impending end to his still world.

And the most unnerving, three: There was someone else on this earth who shared this ability with him.

* * *

John did not realize at first what he had done. He had heard the sound every soldier dreads, the sound of incoming projectiles. There had been gunshots and then the whirring of what he could only assume was a bomb. He had thrown himself to the ground, covering his head and bracing for the explosion, and begging it not to come.

And it didn't.

Instead, he was met with a sudden and crystalline silence. When he gathered the courage to open his eyes, he was convinced he was having some sort of near-death hallucination. The soldiers around him were still, as if God himself had pressed a pause button. John could see bullets in midair, and the incoming bomb some yards away, hovering a few feet above the ground. The silence was almost painful, only broken by his own ragged breathing. He reached out, laying a hand on one of his friends, and the man remained motionless.

Then he realized that there was no guarantee how long this would last.

He knocked bullets from the air, and physically dragged his men as far from the incoming bomb as he could manage. It was long and tiring work, and every second, he worried that the stillness would break and the world would shatter around him. But it didn't.

Once he had done all he believed he could do, he took cover as well, and breathed a sigh of relief. And as soon as he deemed the frozen world unnecessary, it sprang back to life, and the deafening echo of an explosion shook the group of soldiers, many of them far more shocked by their seemingly instantaneous change in position and location than the bomb itself. His world returned to the status quo of a war zone, and it would be nearly a week before John had peace enough to question what all had happened.

... ... ...

London breathed again as suddenly as it had halted, and Sherlock stood on the pavement outside his flat as it did, the city filling once more with noise and life. He looked at it in horror, as if London were a sleeping animal that could awaken and devour him without a moment's notice.

The shock of it had frozen _him_ to his place, like a photo negative of his own skill. Who had done it? Why had they done it? And did they even understand what power they had just acquired?

He turned and ran back into his flat, slamming the door behind him and reaching for a cigarette. As he lit it, he considered his options. And finally, he stood at his window, looking out on London's busy streets, and he willed the world to stop.

... ... ...

John felt a strange sort of twisting inside him as the world stopped again, without his pleading. There had only been a lapse of less than half an hour since the first time it had happened. John was desperately stitching up one of the injured soldiers when he saw his blood had ceased flowing from the wound on his head. John, breathless, stitched faster, barely able to comprehend the implications. He was too consumed by his chances to save lives.

What had caused this to happen twice?

When John felt his fellow soldiers were safe, he deemed the stillness unnecessary as he had the first time, but the world remained frozen. He didn't understand. Was it in his control or not? The world stayed still for nearly two hours, during which time John became nearly insane waiting for resolution.

Finally, it started once more, and he pushed his questions out of his mind to save for later as he began to move the injured men, who were more than shocked at the speed with which the army doctor had stitched their wounds. They attributed the seeming speed to warped perception created by their own exhaustion, and John was grateful.

... ... ...

Sitting alone in a military camp in Afghanistan many days later, John shut his eyes, and thought to himself, Please let the world stop again. He didn't believe it was that simple, but when he opened his eyes, his friends were still, caught mid-laughter across the camp from him. He shook his head in disbelief. He had never been one to doubt that there was more to his world than he knew, but he never imagined he would be such a part of it.

* * *

Sherlock groaned as London stopped. It was happening more and more often of late. He had determined that there _must_ be a second person. It was the only explanation.

Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

Sherlock was not particularly pleased by this. The second person could be anyone, anywhere. In a world with more than six billion people, statistically, he was unlikely to ever meet them. Which meant that they would no doubt spend the rest of their lives annoying each other by stopping the world, having no way to communicate to each other when they intended to do it.

It was all terribly inconvenient.

... ... ...

John wanted desperately to know who the second person was. He wondered where they were, what type of person they were. He wondered if they used this ability for good things or not. And most of all, the longer he had the ability himself, he wondered what it would be like to be in this still world with someone else beside him, instead of alone.

* * *

One day, he was unable to stop the world in time.

He watched as men bled out around him, and though he stopped the world to treat their wounds, he knew that in many cases, it would not be enough, and they would still die soon after he let the world begin again.

For hours, he prolonged the stillness, nearly in tears thinking of what would happen. The world would slip into motion, but many of the men would slip into stillness.

When he forced himself to resume the world, he felt a sharp pain rip through his shoulder, and briefly, wondered if he would join them.

... ... ...

Sherlock stood over the serial killer paralyzed at his feet. It would be so easy to kill him, bypassing all the proper channels of arrest and trial. Lestrade would be happy either way, since he would not know who had kindly rid the world of this monster. Sherlock had faced this dilemma more than once, the knowledge that he had the power to end lives. Most of the time, he wouldn't do it. Instead, he would bind them, or otherwise incapacitate them, and call in Lestrade. The criminal was always confused, and Lestrade was occasionally suspicious, but the criminal would never be believed, and the DI was too grateful to ask questions.

He highly doubted that whoever else was stopping his world was dealing with things like this.

The man at his feet was a terrible person. The flat he lived in was full of weapons. Sherlock could take any of the guns and shoot him. But finally, he decided against it and bound him instead. Although he did allow himself one swift kick to the man's face before phoning Lestrade to come take him into custody.

... ... ...

John wanted to find the second person and punch them in the face for their timing. It was one thing to pause time when he could do something useful, but he was in a hospital, and pausing time just meant a very long delay for the painkillers that were due from the nurse.

And the extra time only allowed him to relive every terrible moment.

By the time the world began again, he was in a near panic, and both his shoulder and his leg throbbed with pain.

They sent him home to England soon after.

* * *

Sherlock noticed the world stopped less after a while. Whoever had discovered their new power clearly didn't enjoy it or felt no reason to use it as he did. He was sure he annoyed the other person with his frequency of use, but he was also sure they wouldn't mind if they knew he was using it to catch murderers.

... ... ...

John had no idea what to do with himself when he was back in London. The nights were long and full of nightmares. The days were longer.

He was nearly paralyzed whenever he thought about where to go from here. His therapist had plenty of suggestions. But he felt like the therapy was more just a motion he was going through than something that would actually heal him.

Stopping the world just made things worse after a while. The days were empty enough without effectively removing all human life from them.

But the first week or so he was back, he enjoyed it. He had seen so many terrible things in Afghanistan, things that would be burned on his memory forever. So he would stop his world when he felt the panic rise in him, and would go walk through Hyde Park, or along the Thames, and remind himself that there was goodness and beauty in this world. He felt like he had to keep reminding himself of this one fact. Not everything was blood and death. There were children playing in the park with their parents. There were gardens and beautiful homes. There was an entire world of art and music. And there was more goodness than evil.

He had to believe that.

... ... ...

One night, John was lying awake on his bed, recently jolted out of sleep by a particularly violent nightmare, when he felt the now familiar internal twist of the second person stopping the world. In between strained and panicked breaths, John silently thanked the stranger. He needed the world to be still and silent for a while, and was unable to focus enough to do it himself. They couldn't know how much he'd needed this, of course, but he still felt so much less alone in that one moment, where he was one of only two people moving in the world. The pause in time gave him just long enough to regain some semblance of calm and mental stability before he heard the cars outside his window again, and the second person went about whatever business had them awake like him.

* * *

Mike led him into the lab at Bart's with a knowing smile on his face. John looked with skepticism at the man at the end of the bench. Introductions were made, and phones passed between hands. The man rattled off a great bit of John's history, and he shifted uncomfortably, feeling like a specimen under one of the lab's microscopes. Even if John stopped the world for hours to examine the man, he would never have been able to read as much as he deduced in a matter of seconds.

He said his name was Sherlock Holmes.

... ... ...

John didn't believe he would become a part of Sherlock's life so easily any more than Sherlock did. But it was as if Baker Street had been missing an essential piece, and that place was now filled by medical journals and tea.

Sherlock had saved many lives in his line of work. John saved his within hours of meeting him, without using deduction or halting the world. He did it out of plain courage and strength. And it was miraculous.

Sherlock didn't stop the world when John was home. He didn't feel he could risk it. John was not the most observant man, but he was certainly smart enough to notice if the layout of Sherlock's experiment in the kitchen had changed, or if Sherlock himself randomly disappeared from his place on the sofa. No, it was much too great a risk. John would either think he had something wrong with himself or would insist on an explanation from Sherlock.

John had more or less ceased using his own ability, because he didn't need to. He didn't want the world to freeze when he was with Sherlock. Sherlock was a creature of nearly constant motion, and John never wanted that to stop. The longer he lived at Baker Street, the more his panics faded, the more at home he felt. He was still saving people, just in a different way.

And someone was saving him.

* * *

John felt a blow to the back of his head before his world went black.

When he came to, his hands were cuffed behind him and his legs and torso tied to the chair he was seated in. His head ached, and the cuffs were digging into the skin of his wrists. There was a man in front of him in a tailored suit, grinning maliciously. As the fog cleared from John's brain, he recognized the man from Bart's.

"Jim? From IT?"

"Jim Moriarty. Perhaps you've heard of me."

John froze the world without another thought. It had been so long since he felt true panic, but now his vision was practically clouded by it. He stared at the man, his predatory smile unwavering in the stillness, like a figure in a wax museum.

He rapidly assessed his situation, finding no way to undo the bonds that held him. No amount of time would help. Moriarty had done an efficient job. His thoughts turned to Sherlock, and suddenly he realized he was the bait.

And all he could do was release the world, and hope they would save each other again.

... ... ...

The problem with being able to stop the world, Sherlock thought, is that it would be much more useful if one could always predict another's actions. And he never predicted a madman dangling John in front of him, threatening to blow him to pieces. John had survived enough of that in Afghanistan. It wasn't supposed to happen in London.

When he held his gun on the bomb with Moriarty standing at the end of the pool daring him to blow them all up, he almost stopped his world. But Moriarty found him interesting enough as it was. What would he feel compelled to do if he realized that Sherlock had other attributes previously unknown to him? What would he do if he vanished into thin air? And what would John do if he suddenly moved from the pool to the safety of Baker Street?

No, he would have to handle this the old fashioned way.

* * *

John wasn't sure why he was so put off by Irene Adler. Logically, he shouldn't have been. She was a good enough person, although her moral compass appeared to point north about as often as Sherlock's did. Still, he hated how _present_ she was in their lives, even when she wasn't physically in the room.

But she was a puzzle, and Sherlock loved puzzles.

John went out one night and stopped the world, sitting alone in the cold, and briefly he wondered, if Sherlock knew about this, would he consider John a puzzle worth solving as well?

... ... ...

Sherlock returned home after dealing with the Irene Adler situation. It was a load off his mind to be done with the whole affair. While she had made for an interesting opponent, there was always a level of smug satisfaction that came with winning the game.

John smiled at him as he walked into the living room of Baker Street. He was seated comfortably in his usual chair, reading, and his eyes seemed to flood with relief to see Sherlock returned in one piece. Sherlock threw his coat over the hook on the door as he briefed John on all that had occurred. John listened with his usual attentiveness, Sherlock moving to sit across from him in his own chair, steepling his fingers and quirking a smile at John's praise and concern. The most amazing thing about John Watson, Sherlock thought, was that even though the world was moving around them, John made it feel stilled just by his presence. No special ability needed. His calming influence always spread over Sherlock in such a way that he didn't feel the need to halt the world. John grounded him and stilled him enough.

Suddenly the prospect of beating Moriarty was not nearly so enticing. It would rattle their still world, and potentially put them both in danger again. Sherlock's smile faded to a frown as soon as John turned away, standing and going to the kitchen to make tea. Sherlock dreaded the shattering of the calm created by this steady little army doctor, and then, finally, he understood.

Love is a dangerous disadvantage.

And John Watson was the final proof.

* * *

John stared in horror at Sherlock, barely more than a silhouette on the roof of the hospital. His phone was clamped to his ear, and he didn't believe the words coming through it. It was nearly disorienting, so much so that he wondered if this was all a terrible trauma-induced nightmare. It wouldn't have been the first time the worst thing his sleeping mind could come up with was something terrible happening to Sherlock. But this was all too real. He could hear what sounded like tears in Sherlock's voice.

And then John heard him say goodbye, and saw the phone drop from his hand.

By the time John thought to stop the world, it was too late.

... ... ...

Sherlock was on the ground across the street. There was no way he could possibly be alive, yet John still refused to believe that the rapidly growing pool of blood belonged to the person who had saved him so many times.

When they wheeled his body away, John remained rooted to his place on the street, a single frozen person in a moving world.

... ... ...

Sherlock cleaned the blood from his face. The coat was salvageable, the scarf too saturated. Molly looked at him in a way that she thought was subtle. She had him in a different lab than the one they usually used, one John would not come to. The second body was in the morgue already in case John battled his way in. Sherlock hoped he would be too distraught to notice the few tiny clues that would show it wasn't really him on that slab.

Sherlock sighed, wondering how much trouble it would be to replace his phone. He couldn't very well go up to the roof and get it. The police would wonder where it had gone. It seemed a terribly petty thing to worry about, but Sherlock found when he thought of all he still had to do, he felt miserably overwhelmed. All he _wanted_ to do was go back to Baker Street and listen to the gentle sounds of John moving about the flat, making tea and rustling newspaper. He wouldn't be home for a very long time, maybe not at all depending on the viciousness that would be unleashed when the spider's network found out their leader was dead on a rooftop.

Molly laid one hand on his shoulder, and he could feel it tremble. He had hated to ask this of her, but there had been no one else he could have trusted.

She said they needed to get going, that he couldn't still be here when the police started pouring in.

He knew she was right. So he stopped his world for a while. He wasn't ready to go quite yet.

... ... ...

When John felt the world stop, he thought it was a salute. The world _should_ stop after losing someone like Sherlock. He hated how the entire city would go on about their daily business as if everything were normal. He knew the news would try to slander Sherlock, and he knew he would fight them every step of the way because it was impossible that Sherlock Holmes was a fake.

Over the next few days, the second person stopped the world a lot. John didn't have to. Whoever it was seemed to need the stillness as much as he did. Maybe they were mourning someone too.

* * *

He hated the cemetery. He hated the birds that still managed to sing despite all the suffering that surrounded them. He hated the people who had told him how sorry they were. He hated the people who had made less than kind remarks about the "freak detective."

One of them was particularly vitriolic. So John stopped the world and twisted his arm behind his back, not enough to dislocate his shoulder, but enough so that when he started the world again, the man cringed at the sudden and unexplained pain.

John wanted to be swallowed up.

... ... ...

Sherlock approached the cemetery after he was confident most of the people were gone, and so when he arrived, it was only John and Mrs. Hudson who remained. He let the world continue to move until Mrs. Hudson walked away. When it was only John left, talking to a tombstone, he stopped it.

... ... ...

John nearly ignored the twist of the world stopping. It wasn't going to interrupt what he had to say. However, he did appreciate the silencing of the birds and distant cars. He could hear himself think now, but he could also hear his voice break as he spoke.

... ... ...

Sherlock waited for John to freeze, but he didn't. His speech continued. Sherlock frowned, looking around at the people on the streets behind him and at Mrs. Hudson across the cemetery. All still. But John's voice continued on, strength behind the occasional shaking in his words. John. As with many things in his life, it had always been John. In a hundred different ways, it was always John. The realization made him laugh before he could stop himself.

... ... ...

John heard a distant laugh and stopped.

Was the second person one of Moriarty's? Had that always been the case?

He spun around, trying to find the person who he had, in a way, silently communicated with since he was in Afghanistan. And finally he saw a figure near the trees, an unmistakable silhouette in a dark coat.

John ran.

Sherlock nearly ran as well – in the opposite direction – anticipating a less than friendly retaliation from John, but he stopped just short of the detective and stared hard at him.

Just as it was always John, it was, and always had been, Sherlock.

John grabbed a hold of his lapels and jerked him forward, and Sherlock winced in anticipation of a blow, given the fiery look in John's eyes. But it was a kiss, not a blow, and Sherlock could feel the smile spread across his face.

There would be a hundred problems tomorrow. The secret was out. The world's only consulting detective would have to find another way to cut the strings of the spider's web. But as he stood there, hands on the doctor's face, and saying hello rather than goodbye, Sherlock found he didn't care. For now, they had a still world, a quiet place where no one could reach them. There would be so much to figure out. But they had all the time in the world. Every second that was stolen from them because of Moriarty would be returned in full.

And despite the fact that everything was paused for as long as they deemed it so, it felt instead like finally, everything was starting.


End file.
